Dear oh dear. Rachel Reeves has ended up in something of a pickle over her employment history, with the Chancellor under fire over whether she has been straight with the public about her economist background. Certainly after that Budget, Mr S is hardly surprised eyebrows are being raised…
Pressure has been piling on Reeves for weeks, with questions arising around exactly how long she worked at various institutions, exactly what she worked as and whether she has been playing fast and loose with the truth of the matter. As the curious case of the Labour MP’s CV rumbles on, Steerpike has pulled together a list of exactly which of her claims have been challenged when. Here’s the full timeline:
LinkedIn history
Reeves has long publicised her employment background on LinkedIn, with the now-Chancellor initially stating that she worked as an economist at the Bank of England between September 2000 and December 2006, before immediately taking another economist role at the Bank of Scotland until December 2009.
15 October 2021
Speaking to Stylist magazine, the Labour MP claimed: ‘I spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank of England and loved it, so I was excited to be given the opportunity to help shape our country’s economic future.’ In the same interview, Reeves also confesses her worst work habit ‘is wanting everything to be done straightaway – we have so much to do in such little time’. Too little time to get your own CV right, eh?
24 October 2024
Inaccuracies on the new Chancellor’s LinkedIn are flagged by Guido Fawkes. The political blog noted Reeves’s claims she’d worked as an ‘economist’ at the Bank of Scotland on LinkedIn, before pointing to previous biographies she’d handed to event organisers that state: ‘Previously, she worked as an economist at the Bank of England, the British Embassy in Washington DC and latterly at Halifax Bank of Scotland.’ Instead it transpires that, according to the Chancellor’s former colleagues, she actually worked in a support department at Scottish bank, managing admin processes and IT-related issues. How very interesting.
14 November 2024
During her first Mansion House speech, Reeves made reference to her economist background at the Bank of England but rather curiously stopped short of claiming she worked under the same title at Halifax Bank of Scotland. Preparing the groundwork, perhaps?
15 November 2024
Eagle-eyed observers then spotted that between introducing inheritance taxes for farmers and cutting the winter fuel payment, the Chancellor managed to find the time to edit her LinkedIn work experience details. Reeves quietly removed her ‘economist at the Bank of Scotland’ position and now claims to have held a ‘retail banking’ job at Halifax. A Treasury source confirmed the correction to Guido, admitting: ‘She worked in retail banking covering various areas drawing on her background as an economist. Her LinkedIn has been updated to reflect that.’
17 November 2024
But it’s not just Reeves’s tenure at Halifax Bank of Scotland that has come under scrutiny. The Chancellor is facing questions over the time she spent at the Bank of England now, too. The Sunday Telegraph picked up on discrepancies between Reeves’s claim in her 2021 Stylist interview and her personal LinkedIn profile. While the Labour MP states she worked at the Bank of England for six years on the online app, Reeves rather bizarrely told the feminist magazine that she had been at the institution for ‘a decade’. More than that, former Tory SpAd Henry Newman pointed out that one of those six years had actually been spent at the London School of Economics for a master’s course. What sort of economist gets her numbers wrong by 50 per cent, eh?
Meanwhile unimpressed Tories tell the Express: ‘It seems Rachel Reeves’s employment history claims are about as accurate as her promises not to raise taxes on working people – based on deception and increasingly proven false.’ Ouch.
18 November 2024
That’s not all the Conservatives have to say about the case. Shadow paymaster general Richard Holden wrote a rather scathing letter to Reeves, calling on the Chancellor to directly respond to the ‘incredibly serious’ claims against her. Holden called on the Labour politician to ‘publish a full, unedited CV’, fuming: ‘The allegations that your CV might not be accurate…would raise significant concerns about your ability to be honest with the British public.’ The gloves are coming off…
I’m sure the Chancellor of the Exchequer @RachelReevesMP & @UKLabour will be clearing this up in no-time
— Richard Holden MP (@RicHolden) November 19, 2024
Just half a dozen CV points@christiancalgie @GuidoFawkes @PA @TelePolitics pic.twitter.com/7brUuN3icN
19 November 2024
And now the Reeves backers are out in force. On LBC today, ally of the Chancellor and ex-Labour minister Siôn Simon gave a rather odd defence of the embattled politician. Brushing off the criticism, Simon first insisted ‘it’s a bit of loose language on a CV or whatever’, before claiming:
It’s much better to have worked in retail banking than to have been an economist at the bank… It was a much more interesting and challenging thing to have done than just to have been an economist for 10 years.
Er, right. That still doesn’t quite explain Reeves’s reluctance to be clear all this in the first place, however.
And to make matters worse Guido revealed that, in official documents submitted to Companies House in 2008, during which time the now-Chancellor was working in ‘retail banking’, Reeves detailed her ‘business occupation’ as ‘economist’. The plot thickens…
Downing Street has refused to say whether Reeves followed ministerial integrity rules after editing her online CV, while the PM’s spokesperson sidestepped questions on the issue, noting instead that Sir Keir Starmer ‘is very clear that this is a Chancellor that has been straight with the public about the state of the public finances and what is necessary to restore financial stability’. The curious case continues…
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